London:
Airports across Europe, including those in the UK and Germany reopened on Wednesday, six days after ash from an Icelandic volcano forced the shutdown of airspace and stranded millions of passengers around the world as airlines lost a whopping 1.7 billion in revenue.
The airspace over most of the United Kingdom, Norway, Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Finland was open again, air traffic authorities said.
All UK airports reopened under a new deal making airlines to agree to conducting "intensive" ash damage inspections of aircraft before and after each flight. Germany and 18 other EU countries also announced full reopening of their air space.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) said that airlines lost around USD 1.7 billion as a result of the shutdown caused by the volcanic ash. During the weekend, carriers were losing USD 400 million per day, IATA Giovanni Bisignani said in Berlin, while describing as "conservative" the earlier estimate of USD 200 million per day.
Europe's air traffic control agency Eurocontrol said 21,000 of the continent's 28,000 scheduled flights will go ahead, as airlines put together operations with planes and flight crews stranded all over the globe. A spokesman for the agency said in Brussels he expected the continent's air traffic to normalise in the coming days.
More than 95,000 flights were cancelled across Europe since the flight ban was imposed on April 15 in the wake of volcanic ash clouds which spread from Iceland to other countries in the continent.